Yeltsin Responds To Vote By Threatening Legislators President Says He’ll Dismantle Parliament, Rule By Decree

President Boris N. Yeltsin threatened Thursday to disband Russia’s combative Parliament and rule by decree, raising the specter of another dramatic power struggle like the 1993 confrontation that ended in gunfire.

Yeltsin defiantly parried legislators’ no-confidence vote with a demand that the lower house of Parliament, the Duma, revoke its decision within 10 days and cooperate with the leadership or capitulate all power to the increasingly erratic chief executive.

The veiled threat of what would constitute at least temporary dictatorship came a day after the Duma vote condemning Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin and his Cabinet for their handling of last week’s deadly hostage-taking incident in the southern town of Budennovsk.

The Duma vote was as much a censure of Yeltsin, who left Russia in the midst of the crisis to attend a largely ceremonial gathering of world leaders in Canada, as it was a denunciation of Chernomyrdin and the defense and police ministries for their failure to protect the Russian public.

But Yeltsin deflected the reprimand by calling on the Duma to revoke that vote or face dismissal.

If the deputies refuse and issue a second no-confidence vote, Yeltsin would be compelled by the constitution to choose between sacking Chernomyrdin and his Cabinet or disbanding Duma.

At a televised meeting with the Cabinet, he made clear his preference for the government over a Parliament that has blocked many of his attempts at economic and political reform.

“The Duma may sign its own death sentence,” Yeltsin told reporters after the session in which Chernomyrdin called on the deputies to reconsider.

Yeltsin got rid of another uncooperative legislature in October 1993, when he sent troops and tanks to crush an armed revolt by political opponents who had barricaded themselves inside the Russian Parliament building in a tense standoff with the Kremlin.

That deadly crackdown served to strengthen the opposition, said Mikhail N. Afanasyev of the Presidential Analytical Center in Moscow. He predicted Yeltsin would refrain from disbanding Parliament and thus avoid “stepping on the same rake twice.”

Yeltsin hinted he might offer a face-saving means for the Duma to reverse itself by sacking high officials considered responsible for allowing the Budennovsk blood-letting in which 121 were killed, according to the latest death toll.

Chernomyrdin’s concession to peace talks with the Chechen rebels as a condition for release of more than 1,000 hostages grabbed in Budennovsk also may have bolstered the prospects for a negotiated conclusion to the 6-month-old war in Chechnya, which could provide another pretext for reversing the no-confidence vote.

Moscow media and Kremlin officials have been effusive in their predictions of a settlement. Yeltsin publicly conceded for the first time that his government may have “lacked political will and flexibility” in earlier negotiations and had depended too much on strong-arm tactics.

Yeltsin’s sparking of the current confrontation was apparently deliberate, as he could have ignored Wednesday’s symbolic vote by the Duma. The president is required to respond only after a second no-confidence vote within three months.